How to manage CTV advertising’s shifting power dynamics
Are the mediation layers between publishers and advertisers in the CTV space dropping off with the increasing emergence of new ad exchanges and the like? And how can platforms adapt? Eventually A Castle’s Andrew Baritz discusses the market’s shifting tectonics and what platforms like Cineverse and C360 Technologies, Inc. are doing to bring buyers closer to publishers in this discussion with Ring Digital’s Brian Ring at the latest Streaming Media Connect.
The changing relationship among buyers, advertisers, and publishers
Ring Digital llc Principal Analyst Brian Ring invites Eventually A Castle CEO Andrew Baritz to dissect the power dynamics surrounding demand-side platforms (DSPs) and supply-side platforms (SSPs) and publishers. He suggests that Cineverse, for which Baritz runs adtech ops, makes a bold statement by refusing to compete with big players and instead using its own distribution scale. “Describe for me how you guys are attacking this,” Ring requests.
Baritz notes that over the past 24–36 months, there’s been a shift in CTV power dynamics due to “a shakeup across DSPs, SSPs, how publishers connect to them, and the various intermediation and mediation layers across the different services, whether that’s Publica, SpringServe, Indicue, C360, or others. There’s a shift in the traditional path that a buyer gets to an advertiser, gets to a publisher, and vice versa. And we’ve seen this with [The] Trade Desk and Openpath, Magnite and other exchanges and SSPs, cutting deals with advertisers directly and often, and [increasingly,] publishers going direct to those advertisers as well.” He adds that a platform like Cineverse helps buyers get closer to publishers. Its technology solutions “bring buyers directly to the publishers with as few of those layers as possible while still being available on all of those other layers.”
Blurred lines and new tools
“We’ve really hit a broad commoditisation of each of these different pieces of the ecosystem. So depending on where you used to sit doesn’t directly require you to still sit there,” Baritz explains. He’s seeing a blurring of lines across DSPs, SSPs, publisher networks, and audience networks regarding questions such as: “[W]ho does what, how do they do it, should they be doing it, are they doing it right, and who does it bring value to?”
Companies such as Magnite has been growing and acquiring other companies, and publishers are growing and gaining confidence in the market and the tools available to them, so inevitably publishers are going to provide new opportunities for buyers to reach them, Baritz concludes.
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